Strike Beards

Beards grown during the writers’ strike

Consider the great beards in history: Confucius, Abe Lincoln, Rasputin. The whiskers seem inseparable from the men. Yet for many guys it is the decision to forgo regular shaving, as a reaction to circumstance, and not the resultant goatee or Vandyke, that counts. “Beards have always marked transitions in men’s lives,” Allan Peterkin, a leading pogonologist, says. (He is the author of “One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair.”) Thus we get Al Gore after the election (whiskers of grievance and release), and Ted Kaczynski in his cabin (isolation, madness), and Johnny Damon with the Red Sox (superstition)—all iconic beards in their proper context.

Conan O’Brien, now forty-four, grew his first-ever beard—“a hobby on my face,” he called it—only recently, after his late-night show went off the air as a result of the Writers Guild of America strike. Six weeks in, he was beginning to resemble a hockey player in mid-“playoff beard” form, or, as he preferred to put it, a “lone gunman.” “In my line of work there’s no opportunity to grow a beard,” O’Brien said, shortly before Christmas. “These shows are the organizing principles of our lives, and the moment they stop you start to go insane.” That morning, a paparazzi photo of O’Brien had appeared in the Post, alongside one of David Letterman, who was also, evidently, growing a strike beard (“LATE GUYS TURN INTO ‘CAVE’ MEN”). “Literally, it’s something to do,” O’Brien said. “You can check on the progress of your beard.”

The strikers themselves were looking a little hairy on the picket lines in midtown. Colin Jost, a writer for “Saturday Night Live,” estimated that ninety per cent of his friends were now barbati. (One of the ten per cent, a young “S.N.L.” staffer, confessed to being “physically incapable of growing a strike beard, or any beard.”) There was no official call to action, Jost said, but, rather, a gradual, snowballing effect, born of equal parts solidarity and apathy. When asked to characterize his facial growth, he said, “Let’s see. It’s sort of a Russell Crowe, ‘3:10 to Yuma’ beard.”

John Solomon, another “S.N.L.” writer, said he was sporting “kind of a Dan Haggerty,” referring to the actor who played Grizzly Adams, and that he’d just been called the Unabomber by a visiting acquaintance from Greece. “The person who blew everybody’s mind was Paul Shaffer,” he said, recalling an impromptu pep talk that Letterman’s bandleader had delivered to the strikers outside Rockefeller Center. “He had a pretty full white beard, and no one recognized him for the longest time.”

“I don’t want to overanalyze my own beard, but, I mean, Trotsky had a beard,” Rob Dubbin, a writer for “The Colbert Report” and an admirer, from his Harvard days, of the “thesis beard,” said. (A mutant cousin of the thesis beard, Jost pointed out, is the “neck beard,” grown sometimes during final exams.) “When you see someone else with a beard on the line, it resonates with the idea of lean times.”

Not everyone, alas, is cut out for the unshorn life, however principled. David Scarpa, the writer of the upcoming remake of “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” allowed that he had finally shaved his strike beard after his wife said he looked like “the Gorton’s fisherman.” “I don’t know if leaking the news of my capitulation to the media undermines the strike effort,” he wrote in an e-mail. (A Writers Guild spokesman said, “As long as it calls attention to the issues at stake and gets the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers back to the bargaining table . . . we’re all for it.”) Brian Koppelman, whose credits include “Rounders” and “Ocean’s Thirteen,” cited Bjorn Borg’s old Wimbledon beards as an inspiration to persevere, but he wasn’t sure how long he could hold out. “As much as I will not bend to the will of the A.M.P.T.P., I will bend quite easily to the will of my eight-year-old daughter,” he said.

O’Brien was threatening to stick with it long enough to bring his beard back on the air this week, when his show is scheduled to resume, almost as a form of blackmail: “Let’s get these writers a fair shake or this beard stays.” A side benefit of his new hobby was that it was giving him something to joke about in the absence of a writing staff. “This is the only creative act I’ve been allowed to participate in,” he said and, as if to keep in shape, continued to rattle off shaggy inspirations (“Charlie Daniels, now that’s a killer beard”), quips (“I injected caulking into it about a week ago”), and punch lines (“I’m the only guy chopping wood outside his Manhattan co-op”). ♦

Ben McGrath began working at The New Yorker in 1999, and has been a staff writer since 2003.